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WILLIAMS is available for Media
Interviews:
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MaximsNews
Columnist
Ian
Williams
Reforming the United
Nations
Ian Williams
is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for
The Nation and a weekly columnist
for www.MaximsNews.com.
Ian Williams is the past
president of the United Nations
Correspondents Association. See
his Bio.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
UNITED
NATIONS -- 24 March 2005 / www.MaximsNews.com
/ It
took World War Two to "reform"
the
League of Nations
into the United Nations – and it has
often looked as it might take World War
Three to reform the UN.
Kofi
Annan's new report "In Larger
Freedom," is in some measure an
attempt to change the table cloth while
leaving the table settings where they are
– and avoid the need for world war to
change the UN Charter.
His
proposals need minimal changes to the text
of the Charter, since, as he implicitly
recognizes, there is a lot of adaptability
and flexibility inside the current
framework, which has, for example, allowed
the Trusteeship Council and Military Staff
Joint Committee to fade into ritual
insignificance while building a whole new
department of peacekeeping which is
nowhere mentioned in the Charter.
The
most visible change to the Charter will be
the section on the composition of the
Security Council.
Sadly,
it will almost certainly take up the most
attention and divert attention from the
rest of the proposed reforms which are
more important than which inflated
diplomatic Pooh Bah sits for how long on
the Council.
The
success or otherwise of his proposals
depends far more on the willingness of the
member states to change the way they work
than it does on organograms and legal
draftsmanship.
What
Annan has done is to craft a package that
offers inducements to almost all global
constituencies to sign on for it.
The
"deal"
emphasizes UN involvement in security and
antiterrorist activities, which should
make the
US
and other developed countries happy, while
binding them to more active and sincere
delivery on their Millennium Development
Goals pledges to the developing world,
notably an end to import restrictions and
an increase to 0.7% of their GDP to aid.
One
big problem, but by no means the only one,
is the attitude of the US
administration.
Many
of its members use the rhetoric of reform,
when what they really mean is the
destruction or weakening of the
organization. Some members of the
US
administrations have used the rhetoric of
human rights and democracy when they may
not have truly, deeply and sincerely meant
it.
The
Secretary General has, in some measure,
called their bluff. They may not like it.
However,
Annan has tactfully but accurately pointed
out that the General Assembly, in which
the Non Aligned and Group of 77 can call
the shots, has failed in many respects to
exercise its authority, and has allowed
itself to be marginalized.
Indeed,
he does not says so, but one of his bolder
proposals, for a Human Rights Council he
implicitly tries to remedy the failures of
the regional blocs in the Assembly, whose
rotas and Buggin
's
turn principles have led to egregious
human rights offenders being seated on the
existing Human Rights Commission.
(In
fact the same system has led to some
scofflaw members being returned for
temporary seats to the Security Council as
well.)
The
High Level Panel despaired of a solution
and suggested expanding the Commission to
include all members, which would somewhat
spoil the point of having a special body
to consider human rights.
Instead,
Annan suggests that the new Council be
elected by the full Assembly, with two
thirds of votes being necessary for any
successful member.
In
some quarters this proposal has led to
accusations that Annan was pandering to
the
US. This is ridiculous.
As
John Bolton will possibly demonstrate, the
US
that gave the world Abu Ghraib can also
worry about an empowered Human Rights
Body, not least when it cannot point to
the beams in other members
'
eyes to justify the motes in their own.
While
some will see pandering to neo-imperial
pretensions in Annan
's
proposals to have the Security Council
explicitly accept the High Level Panel's
codification of principles for
humanitarian intervention, the Bolton's of
this world will see its obverse – an
attempt to weaken the freedom of maneuver
that some in the US administration claim
they have by setting limits on US action
without Security Council approval.
But
then, is the US sincere about stopping the
slaughter in Darfur, or does it prefer
inaction excused by scape-goating a UN
that it refuses to empower to deal with
it.
Equally,
one can doubt that the Report
's
robust support for the Kyoto Protocol and
other measures against climate change, its
strong support for the ICC, or for the
land mine and small arms conventions are
exactly what John Bolton and his
colleagues in the Pentagon have in mind
when they talk of UN Reform.
In
fact, this type of agenda has them waking
at nights in a cold sweat.
Of
course, it has been asked whether this
Reform package is not a desperate attempt
by a beleaguered and besmeared Secretary
General to take the mind of the world off
the so-called
"Oil
for Food Scandal."
In
fact, most of these proposals have been
several years in the making – the rest
of the world has been wisely discounting
the fevered allegations of the
conservative echo-chambers in the US, and
it is in fact more plausible that those
allegations were made precisely to stop
the UN being effective.
In
effect, however, it will not be Annan who
has to do the canvassing and persuasion in
Washington.
It
is the natural global constituency for
these proposals – the generally
civilized law abiding countries of the
world, Canada, Europe, Latin America,
South Africa, Japan and even India, which
have given a broad welcome to the package.
In
the next six months, they will be calling
on the White House and Condoleezza Rice
and by-passing Bolton, and in September,
they will be coming to New York for the
Sixtieth Anniversary commemoration of the
founding of the United Nations, and may
even remind George W. Bush that the United
Nations was an American project, founded
in the United States.
If
the Bush administration wants allies, it
had better listen.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A
New Book by Ian Williams (July
10, 2005)
Rum:
A Social and Sociable History of the Real
Spirit of 1776
by Ian Williams
Ian
Williams
discusses the more sociable aspects of rum with Tom Roper former
Australian cabinet minister, and Trinidad and Tobago's current Minister of
Tourism, Howard Chin Lee. February 2005
Rum:
A Social and Sociable History of the Real
Spirit of 1776
by Ian Williams
Rum arguably shaped the modern world.
It was to the eighteenth century what oil
is to the present, but its significance
has been diminished by a misguided sense
of old-fashioned morality dating back to
Prohibition.
In fact, Rum shows
that even the Puritans took a shot now and
then. Rum, too, was one of the major
engines of the American Revolution, a fact
often missing from histories of the era.
Ian Williams’s book—as biting and
multilayered as the drink
itself—triumphantly restores rum’s
rightful place in history, taking us
across space and time, from the slave
plantations of seventeenth-century
Barbados (the undisputed birthplace of
rum) through Puritan and revolutionary New
England, to voodoo rites in modern Haiti,
where to mix rum with Coke risks invoking
the wrath of the gods.
He also depicts the
showdown between the Bacardi family and
Fidel Castro over the control of the
lucrative rights to the Havana Club label.
Telling photographs are also featured in
this barnstorming history of the real
"Spirit of 1776."
Pre-Order from Amazon.com
- Hardcover: 328 pages
- Publisher: Nation Books (July
10, 2005)
- ISBN: 1560256516
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